Populárna kultúra v znamení Prometea (vstupné poznámky a vyhliadky)

Abstract

Methodologically connecting the experience and interpretation-based aesthetic approach to popular culture (Juraj Malíček) and pragmatist aesthetics (Richard Shusterman) on one hand and the views of what is called arch-textual thematology (Mariana Čechová) on the other, the paper seeks to observe the ties between an arch-text, in this particular case the Promethean myth, and “pop.-texts”, i.e. such pop cultural works of art (films, TV series, literary texts, comics etc.), within the framework of which the Promethean myth appears in one way or another and which can be labelled with the agnomen “pop”. The consideration is core-like based on the exceedingly saturated and complex work of the German comparatist Gűnter Peters entitled Prometheus: Modelle eines Mythos in der europäischen Literatur (2016) in which the author thematises models of the Promethean myth in the context of European verbal art. Various models or appearances of a reanimation of the Promethean myth in various (pop cultural) works of art become in the paper referentially an object of interest — from Kafkaʼs parable about Prometheus through “Promethean” episodes of TV series like The X-Files (1997), Bones (2013), a Supernatural (2013) and films like Prometheus (2012) to the Promethean and iconic novel by Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818) and its adaptations. The basic leitmotif of the paper is in a sense the problem of the iconisation of suffering as a principal thematic segment of the Promethean myth.